"THE CITY OF GOLD―EL DORADO"

By listening the phrase "The city of Gold" or "The city wrapped with Gold" the city that comes in our mind is none but "EL DORADO".

"EL DORADO" means "Made of Gold". 

The word originates from a Spanish word "El Hambre Dorado" or "El Rey Dorado" which means "Man Made by Gold". 

From the ancient era, there existed many imaginary provinces. El Dorado is one of them. The controversial existence of El Dorado has taken the lives of many keen people. Once the Europeans even started a massive competition regarding the invention of the mysterious city just depending on the rumors regarding the same. 

Following Christopher Columbus, the Spanish imperialists set many colonies in South America at the middle of fifteenth century. At that time the denizens used the barter system. For this reason, they did not gave an expensive value to the metals like Gold, Silver or even Platinum. Rather they used them for making jewels and  sculptures. So by observing these, the capitalist raiders thought that the natives have some Gold mines there. This misconception raised a belief on the existence El Dorado. Some rituals there also supported these rumor to be valid.

At 1300 AD, a civilization named "Musaika" got developed in South America. It was ruled by the king. But interestingly the elder nephew of the king was chosen there as the next ruler. And for his enthronement ceremony, he was coated with crumbled gold. Afterwards he was taken to a nearby lake where he immerged gold ornaments and other gold stuffs devoted to the Goddess there. He thus expressed his ultimate sacrifices to the Goddess.   

Spanish writer Juan Rodriguez Freyle has mentioned this rituals in his writings.

Later on, The European power made many efforts to get the Gold out of this lake named as "Lake Guatavita".

In the history, we get the existence concept of El Dorado in 1531. Diogo Daurddus, the governor of East Venezuela, captured many natives and there he  came to know about this glorious province. But later he got accidental death by poisonous effects.

Presently the lake Guatavita is situated at a distance of 59 Km. from Bogota, the capital of Columbia. It is 125 meters deep with 2178000 square feet area.

In those days, the natives treated this lake as a holy place but in 1965 the Columbia announced it as a preserved land.

Before  that, two times it has been tried to recover Gold from the lake and they also got some of gold there pricing about five crores as of now.

Afterwards, Ambrufias Dalfinger, Ganjalo Pinjaro, Philip Hon and many more adventurous keen tourists spent a long time in the search of the EL Dorado.

Thus El Dorado has always been a remarkable, controversial agenda to every adventurous heart.

প্রবন্ধটি বাংলায় পড়ুন "এল ডোরাডো"